Need For Speed (And Predictivity)

Today at GE’s Mind+Machines 2013 event here in Chicago, Immelt energetically talked about customers’ needs for outcomes, speed and predictivity. While many people talk about translating big data into actionable data--are they doing it fast enough?

Immelt says GE has $160 billion in service backlogs from its businesses (not just aviation), and to support that--it’s necessary to marry asset optimization with operational optimization. Today the company launched 14 new predictive offerings--with 14 launch customers. Immelt would like that number of new offerings to double next year. To put this in context, GE launched 10 last year--services that resulted in $400 million of orders, according to Immelt.

GE has a big vision of the industrial internet--and it is partnering with companies like Intel, Pivotal, AT&T, Amazon, Kaggle an Accenture to build its ecosystem to help transform services.

As Florian Zettelmeyer, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, told Minds+Machines attendees, you don’t have to become a data scientist to effectively move in this industrial internet age--but you do have to have the skills to ask the right questions, understand what the data is telling you, and know how to link cause and effect.

In other words, “Adjust your processes” to effectively use data and “empower yourself” with a working knowledge of data science.

The pioneer years of aviation included both successful and misguided efforts to make the number of safe landings approximate to the number of takeoffs. Here are some notable examples on both sides of that record.